tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58778721961225979562024-03-17T20:02:50.620-07:00Word SaladMy ramblings about anything and everything.Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.comBlogger425125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-63486694813432119002016-03-11T10:45:00.000-08:002016-03-23T18:59:20.559-07:00The Lion and Its Two Whelps<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">
One of the people I follow on Twitter is writer Reza Aslan, the author of <b>Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth</b>. I became aware of Aslan when he got attacked on Fox News for writing about Jesus even though Aslan is a Muslim. So naturally I read the book, and can recommend it for those who like biographies and history. A lot of what was in the book I am familiar with from reading earlier works by other authors, but Aslan gave a more thorough history of the Zealot movement than I had seen before and is very good at conveying details that let you see what is happening.</div>
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So when Aslan began tweeting about an upcoming project of BoomGen studios, a television series called <b>Of Kings and Prophets</b>, based on the book of Samuel, I decided to watch the first episode.</div>
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I had forgotten that I tend not to like historical dramas. It’s not a bad show, and I’ll probably watch at least another episode, but I couldn’t really get into the story. And because I couldn’t get into the story, little details that I might otherwise have overlooked began to nag at me, and one of those details involved a lion.</div>
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Following the old dictum of “show, don’t tell”, the writers concocted a portion of the story about David waking up one night to find that a large number of the flock of sheep he had been tending had been attacked by a large predator. As a result of the attack, his family was unable to pay their taxes. When David went to the tax collector to explain the situation, the tax collector ordered him to be flogged. David was able to escape flogging by volunteering to go and kill the animal, a lion. David was able to track it, kill it, and bring its pelt back to court.</div>
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Now, practically none of this is in the first book of Samuel. What we have is the account, in chapter 17, of David going to the Israelite camp to bring food to his older brothers just as Goliath has issued his challenge to fight a single champion. As David finds out, “And it will be, that the man who will kill him, the King will enrich him with great riches, and he will give him his daughter, and he will make his father's house free in Israel.” (Schmuel 1, Chapter 17, verse 25 from the online Tanach at chabad.org)</div>
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Rashi’s* commentary, a very nice feature of the online Tanach, explains “<b>and he will make his father’s house free: </b>from the things mentioned in the laws of the kingdom,” one of which things is the obligation to pay taxes.</div>
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David does not take just one person’s word for it. He asks several other soldiers and gets the same answer. So as we all know, he goes to Saul and offers to fight Goliath. Saul is dubious that a shepherd lad can fight a man who has been a warrior since childhood, at which point David claims, “Your bondsman was a shepherd of sheep for his father, and there came a lion and also a bear, and carried off a lamb from the flock. And I went out after him and smote him, and saved it from his mouth. And he arose upon me, and I took hold of his jaw, and I smote him and slew him. Both the lion and the bear has your bondsman slain, and the uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he taunted the armies of the living God” (verses 34-36)</div>
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So here we have the elements of the story that OKAP tells: David concerned about freeing his family from taxes; David slaying a lion to rescue a lamb. Unfortunately, as several reviewers have pointed out, in the OKAP version, David comes off as the worst shepherd ever: he’s asleep when a large portion of his flock was slaughtered: enough so that his family is unable to pay its taxes. In the Bible version, of course, David is watchfully protecting his flock to the point of killing an animal as large as a lion or bear if need be to rescue a single lamb from its jaws.</div>
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But here is where we get to the detail that bothers me. The animal that is harassing David’s flock is a male lion, not a lioness. This doesn’t make a huge difference to the story in the Bible version. While the job of hunting to feed the tribe usually falls to the lionesses, not the males, male lions can hunt. Both male and female cubs are taken on hunting trips with their mothers and taught to hunt. Males, however, when they do hunt usually hunt larger game, like gazelles, not smaller domestic animals, like lambs. In the Bible version, David has rescued a single lamb from the lion’s jaws. It is not impossible that a young male, leaving his birth pride to find a new one, gets hungry along the way and grabs a lamb from a flock. But a full grown male harassing a whole flock of sheep? I dunno. That sounds to me more like the kind of hunting a lioness or two or three would be doing.</div>
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So being me, and following Reza Aslan on Twitter anyway, I tweeted him to ask why, given that lionesses are the hunters, it wasn’t a lioness killing David’s sheep. I did not get an answer.</div>
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Okay, I can understand that, in one way. It is hard to convey in 140 characters that a question is not a rhetorical one whose object is saying, “Nyaah, nyaah, you screwed up, and on a detail that anyone who ever saw <b>The Lion King</b> would know.”</div>
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The thing is, it wasn’t a rhetorical question, because actually, I could see some legitimate reasons for making the sheep killer a male lion, and I really did want to know if one of them applied. </div>
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Certainly one possibility is ignorance - not knowing that the lioness does the killing, but that’s not exactly abstruse knowlege, so that to me was the least likely explanation. </div>
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Another possible reason is translation - maybe the Hebrew word used excludes lionesses and only applies to males. It turns out that Hebrew does have separate word for lioness, but once again we have Rashi’s commentary to turn to: “<b>Both the lion and the bear: </b>These three words (<span style="font-family: "lucida grande"; line-height: normal;">גם</span> <span style="font-family: "lucida grande"; line-height: normal;">את</span> <span style="font-family: "lucida grande"; line-height: normal;">גם</span>) are of inclusive nature, meaning a lion and its two whelps, and a bear and its two cubs.” I think the example he gives means the words are inclusive of males, females, and children of the animals named, so even though the word David uses is translated lion, it could include the lioness, just as the English word “lion” does. </div>
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Okay, so what about tradition? David is of the tribe of Judah, a tribe whose symbol is the lion. Maybe there is a future plot point in which the lion skin that David brings back to court becomes the symbol of his tribe. Or not - the association between Judah and a lion goes back to the book of Genesis: specifically, the blessings Jacob gave to his sons at his death. “A cub [and] a grown lion is Judah. From the prey, my son, you withdrew. He crouched, rested like a lion, and like a lion, who will rouse him?” Rashi considers this to be a prophecy of the coming of David, “He prophesied about David, who was at first like a cub: 'When Saul was king over us, it was you who led Israel out and brought them in' (<a href="http://www.chabad.org/15865#v2">II Sam. 5:2)</a>, and at the end a lion, when they made him king over them.” Well, maybe something will be done with that in future episodes.</div>
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So the one explanation left in my mind is visual impact. Lions have manes. A male lion’s pelt makes more of an impact than a female’s pelt when you stride into a court holding it draped over your shoulder. </div>
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By the time I had arrived at this point in my thinking, I had googled enough about lions to be reminded that the lion in Narnia is named Aslan, a connection I had honestly not made before. So I tweeted Dr. Aslan again, but still didn’t get an answer to my question. Okay, perhaps I should have thought a bit about how tired anyone with the name Aslan could get of Narnia references, Muslim or no. Perhaps no response is not the worst possible outcome. At least he hasn’t blocked me, which means I was able to see the link he tweeted to an interview in the Huffington Post with OKAP’s executive producer Mahyad Tousi, and while I didn’t expect an explanation of why a lion to emerge from it, I read it anyway, and encountered this exchange:</div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Q: On the one hand, Hollywood excludes minorities and women and, on the other hand, it has a history of perpetuating stereotypes. Women are often shown as two-dimensional sex objects. Do the show's female characters defy this stereotype in any way?<br />A: Yes, absolutely. Our job as dramatists is to breathe life into all the characters. It's no secret that the Bible generally doesn't provide much in terms of character psychology or motivation for its women, with a few exceptions of course. So from the start in our conversations with Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (the show's creators) and subsequently with our showrunner Chris Brancato, we were in agreement that the women of <b>Of Kings and Prophets</b> must play a far more central role than they are provided with in the Bible. Personally, I operate from the perspective that even in the most patriarchal societies women have been key players, even when the history books don't reflect that. I believe this is also true of scripture.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 16px;">A quick search for Chris Brancato reveals that despite the promising first name, he’s a man, too. So from the start, three men agreed that, “The women of <b>Of Kings and Prophets</b> must play a far more central role than they are provided with in the Bible” and decided how to do that.</span><b></b></div>
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I was wrong. The interview did, in fact, answer my question about the lion.</div>
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*Rashi is an acronym for Shlomo Yitzchaki, 22 February 1040 – 13 July 1105), Latin name Salomon Isaacides, a medieval French rabbi and author of a comprehensive commentary on the Talmud and commentary on the Tanakh.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-49326658206258434552015-12-12T09:35:00.001-08:002015-12-12T09:35:44.953-08:00Welcome!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: black; font-kerning: none;">This is a video of Canadian children welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada by singing a </span>historical song that was sung to the Prophet Mohamed when he sought refuge from Makkah to Medina.</div>
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Now pardon me while I go hunt up a hanky.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-46888955698372471312015-11-18T10:15:00.000-08:002015-11-18T10:15:10.133-08:00Refuge<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">
<b>Egyptian border, somewhere around 1 AD, give or take</b></div>
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Egyptian official: Okay, you two with the baby, hand over your papers.</div>
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Joseph: Papers? I’m not sure what you mean.</div>
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Egyptian official: Identification papers, proof of citizenship . . .</div>
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Joseph: We don’t have any of that. I’m Joseph, and this is my wife Mary and our son Jesus. We are looking for refuge.</div>
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Egyptian official: So you say. Where are you from, anyway?</div>
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Joseph: We came here from Bethlehem.</div>
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Egyptian official: Bethlehem? Why do you want to leave Bethlehem?</div>
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Mary: It’s Herod. He’s killing all firstborn infants. If you don’t let us take refuge here, Jesus could be killed!</div>
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Egyptian official: You’re from Herod’s kingdom? In Judea? Look, the last time we let in any of your kind in it ended with plagues, locusts, our own firstborn being mysteriously killed. You all left saying you wanted your own country and your own language, and your own religion, and now you want to come back? </div>
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You’re troublemakers, all of you. The Babylonians couldn’t control you, the Assyrians couldn’t control you, I bet not even the Romans could control you. If Herod is cracking down on dissidents in his own country, I’m sure he has his reasons.</div>
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Mary: If you can’t let us in, could you at least let our little boy in? Surely some family would want to adopt him. If you don’t, he’s going to die!</div>
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Egyptian official: No, ma’am. Nobody here wants him. He needs to be with his own parents. Just not here, is all.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-62876003803596398692015-07-23T06:07:00.000-07:002015-07-23T06:55:53.496-07:00Obligations<div style="color: #444444; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A few weeks ago, I saw someone I follow on Tumblr use the neologism “conversate” in place of “converse” and got to thinking about the process of “back formation” - the process of creating a new lexeme (roughly, a new word) by removing actual or supposed affixes. Since many words that end in the suffix “ation”, the way “conversation” does, do derive from root words that end in “ate”, (think <i>dominate/domination, navigate/navigation, celebrate/celebration</i>) “conversate” isn’t a bad guess if you don’t know that the word you are looking for is “converse”. Dictionary.com actually dates it back to 1970-75, which surprises me. I would have been willing to bet that “conversate” didn’t exist back in the 1990′s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are a number of words, however with the suffix “ation” that do not have roots that end with “ate”. We have <i>imagine/imagination,</i> <i>accredit/accreditation, denote/denotation, discolor/discoloration, expect/expectation</i>, to name a few. I wonder if we are ever going to see the use of “imaginate”?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I think we are stuck with “conversate”. It sounds both less formal and more extensive than “converse” does. Besides, there is precedence. In American English, at least, we have both the word “<i>oblige</i>” and the word “<i>obligate</i>”, and each takes the noun form “obligation”. “Obligate” is also an adjective, but the verb form dates back around five centuries, according to my googling, and has been found in the novel <i>Pamela</i>, contradicting the charge that it is purely an Americanism. There are a few guesses as to why we have both words, but the one I find most convincing is that “obligate”, like “conversate” and “orientate”, is a back formation, in the case of “obligate” from the word “obligation”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Interestingly enough, though, my reading also revealed that in American law, at least, the words “obligate” and “oblige” have different degrees of force, and it does make a difference which one you use.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So maybe a few hundred years from now, linguists will be arguing over the the nuances of using “conversate” versus “converse”. So be it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I just hope we never, ever get the word “imaginate”.</span></div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-52496845303867803092015-03-28T12:27:00.001-07:002015-03-28T12:28:10.195-07:00The Party<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This being the wedding day, I am posting the last of the three <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-i-met-my-husband.html" target="_blank">true love stories that I originally wrote for my friend on Tumblr</a>. If someone that I know reads my blog and is a character in the story wants to quibble over details, just let me remind that person that I got the story second and third hand because he tends to tell these things to other family members and then assumes he has also told them to mama. No matter, the details aren't what's important, anyway. </i></span><br />
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This is a true story. It happened to two people I know.</div>
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<i>She wasn’t supposed to be at the party. </i></div>
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She was from Venezuela. She and her husband met in high school, attended college in the United States, married and had a baby. She thought she knew everything about him, but it turned out she didn’t. Now she was living in London and he was living in Scotland, and their divorce was almost final. She brought her little boy up to visit him and then they were going to spend three days seeing Loch Ness.</div>
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But there was a mix-up with his driver's license, so she went back to London. After all, there was that party.</div>
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<i>He wasn’t supposed to be at the party.</i></div>
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He was from the United States. In 2008, he had taken a job with a start up company. The owners’ plan was to build the business up enough to be tempting enough for a larger company to buy, but then the recession of 2009 hit, so the owners had to run the company themselves. There was enough European business for the company to send him and his boss to live in London as their European branch. </div>
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His cousin was getting married back home that weekend, and he was supposed to be there, but he couldn’t get the time off.</div>
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But there was that party. That was how they met.</div>
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A year later, she got a promotion and a transfer, back to Houston. Around the same time, his company told him that having him based in Europe was too expensive, and that when his visa ran out, they wanted him home, back in Austin. Since he mostly worked either from home or onsite, he asked if really needed to live in Austin. Could he maybe live in Houston, and just go to Austin the few times a year he was needed there?</div>
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So now they both live together in Houston. They are building a house and making wedding plans.</div>
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He says he wasn’t supposed to be at the party. She says she wasn’t supposed to be at the party.</div>
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I say they were.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span>Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-41984078064913000682015-03-18T18:47:00.000-07:002015-03-31T08:33:04.958-07:00The Flowers<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is the second of the true love stories I wrote for my Tumblr friend. By the way, that's "true love stories" as in love stories that are true, but I certainly hope they also depict True Love. All of the stories were written last summer.</span></i><br />
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The picture showed up in my Facebook feed, a dozen roses and a card with pictures of the two of them from over the years. The caption was of course in Hungarian, “<span style="color: #141923;">Szerelem, boldogság 10 év után is” followed by a heart, which Google Translate renders as “Love, happiness, even after 10 years”.</span></div>
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Ten years? Ten years ago in May? Ten years ago this coming August she arrived in the US from Hungary, our third foreign exchange student, sixteen about to turn seventeen. I sat with her while she unpacked and watched her pin a picture of her and a young man to the oversized bulletin board we kept for just such mementoes. “Who is that?” I asked.</div>
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“My boyfriend.” He looked a little old for a high school student, but I remembered high school well enough to know how differently the young men in it had matured. Still, I had to ask, “How old is he?”</div>
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“Twenty-six.” Anna laughed at the expression on my face. “My parents were worried when I first met him, but once they got to know him, they said it was okay for us to date.”</div>
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“And then they sent her to the U.S. for a year,” my husband pointed out to me later that night. Not quite a year, but still. The handsome young man in the picture would have no trouble meeting interested women closer to home, and closer to his age.</div>
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Anna quickly talked my husband into buying a microphone and some software for his aging computer and used it to talk with J, the boyfriend, every afternoon. She also talked to her parents, her brothers, and several friends. American Field Service guidelines suggested discouraging much contact with home, maybe a letter a week and one phone call a month, but Anna had bonded to us like Superglue within days of meeting us, and easily made friends at school. She found young men to escort her to the Winter Formal and the Junior-Senior Prom, and even held a party at our house to entertain her friends at the end of the school year. It would have been petty of us to interfere with her communication to those back home.</div>
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The year after she left, we visited her in Hungary, and met J. We could see why her parents were impressed. He wasn’t immature, he treated her with affection and respect, and they just seemed right for each other. I was amused by one story Anna told us. She and J had gone to Croatia for vacation the summer before, after she returned from the US, and while there she got a henna tattoo. When she returned home, she convinced her parents it was a permanent tattoo, and they were furious with her.</div>
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“So let me see if I get this,” I told my husband later. “Her parents don’t mind her spending her vacation alone with an older man, but they have a hissy fit over her getting a tattoo.” I reminded myself again that I’m not her real mom.</div>
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Anna moved to another city to go to college and J got a job there and moved with her. They lived together in an apartment. We visited Anna again a few years ago while spending a long visit with my son in Paris, and then two years ago they came to spend time with us while we were on another visit with my son, this time in London. By this time Anna had graduated and was working. I asked if there were any wedding plans and she said that J was worried about getting married because he had friends who broke up soon after marrying, but that he knew it was important to her and was saving up for a ring. Last fall they announced their engagement. They bought a house this year, they are coming to visit us for a few weeks this fall, and the wedding is next year*.</div>
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Ten years. Ten years between them. Ten years together. Ten years since she last was here with us.</div>
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Ten years.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>*This August, and we're going.</i></span></div>
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Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-34784590832964471742015-03-17T09:18:00.000-07:002015-03-28T12:29:06.449-07:00How I Met My Husband<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>While looking for some medical information that I hoped I had scanned into my computer, I found a folder called "True Love Stories", written to give to someone on Tumblr who was collecting stories of unconventional meetings and couplings. Since I have been too preoccupied with my son's upcoming wedding to write lately (not too busy, mind you, just too preoccupied), I decided I can post these, at least. This is the first one.</i></span><br />
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Some background to the story: when I was in graduate school, I met my first husband. He was an Eagle Scout and enjoyed camping, so he volunteered as an assistant scoutmaster with a scout troop near the university we attended. Our first real date was to a covered dish dinner award ceremony (Court of Honor) for scouts achieving merit badges. I don’t remember any of the scouts I met that night, but keep in mind, there were a lot of them there.</div>
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Next background bit: ten years later, my husband and I were invited to a party for the troop’s 50 year anniversary. By then we had a two and a half year old son. Our marriage was getting a little rocky, given that he had a hair trigger temper, but I was in it until death do us part, and not looking for anything more than a few minutes conversation with the cute young man with curly brown hair standing next to me at the refreshment table. In fact, by a day or so later I had forgotten him.</div>
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By four years later, it had become apparent that the death that was going to part my husband and me was likely to be untimely, likely to be violent, and likely to be mine. I tossed him out of the house and filed for divorce. Eventually I joined a singles group that, among other activities, held a weekly volleyball game. One night, I looked across the volleyball net and saw a cute younger man with slightly splayed feet, a feature that for some reason I found totally adorable. I also thought he looked ten years younger than me, and figured he wouldn’t be interested.</div>
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It turned out he was interested, and only six years younger than me. After a few weeks of volleyball, he asked me out for dinner. We talked the usual getting acquainted chit-chat people do on first dates, and I learned he was a) from New Orleans and b) an Eagle Scout. “Where in New Orleans?” I asked, suspecting I knew. “Uptown.” “What troop were you in?” I wasn’t surprised to hear the answer. “Did you know (ex’s name)?” “Yes, he was one of our assistant scoutmasters.” “He’s also my ex-husband.”</div>
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By this time I decided if I had spent my first date with my ex-husband watching this kid get his Eagle Scout award, there wasn’t going to be a second date for the two of us. In his zeal to prove to me it wasn’t so, the next week the cute young man showed me the dated certificate that came with his Eagle, and along with it he had a program from the 50 year anniversary party.</div>
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Oh, my gosh! The curly haired young man (now less curly haired, and starting to gray) from the party!</div>
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Eight weeks later we were engaged, and slightly less than a year from our meeting at the volleyball game (the meeting I refer to as “the one that took”), we were married. Twenty-seven years later, we are still married. I fondly imagine Fate pushing us together two or three times, saying, “Will you idiots just get it, already? I have other business to attend to.”</div>
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And it took 2 or 3 tries, but we finally got it.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-64728543320706966762014-12-15T07:34:00.000-08:002015-01-13T05:43:50.259-08:00I'll Ride with You, But Do I Have to Bring Jesus with Me?<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
I woke up in the middle of the night to see a tweet from dancer Sharna Burgess, that said “Thinking of you” with the hashtag, “prayersforsydney”. [Thanks, lsn, for the correction. The error was all mine, not that of the lovely Sharna Burgess, and I made it twice.] Knowing that she is Australian, I figured she meant the city, and a little further reading showed that there was a hostage situation going on in a cafe there.</div>
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By morning I woke up again, this time to the hashtag “illridewithyou”. Since the hostage taker is Muslim, Muslims around the city are concerned about reactions to them, and their fellow Australians have begun offering to accompany them on public transportation to prevent harassment, or worse. “Illridewithyou” is trending worldwide as I write, with both concrete offers of help along specific routes and supportive comments.</div>
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And as it happens, the offers of help fit in well with the subject of yesterday’s sermon at St. Anonymous.</div>
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I showed up at church after a long absence. Not so long, when you consider that I was there three weeks ago for the bake sale, but that was Layperson Sunday, so Pastor J was not there. Yesterday she greeted me like the prodigal kid, minus the ring and the fatted calf. I wonder if she would be so happy to see me there if she knew about my habit of discussing her sermons on my blog, not usually in a favorable light. I really need to make more of a point of writing about the ones I like and appreciate, not to mention about the things I like and appreciate about St. Anonymous in general, but the whole point of my blog is to give my grump side a place to play.</div>
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Yesterday’s sermon, however, was not one of my favorites. It was based on the story of the shepherds in Luke:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Shepherds and the Angels</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>8 </b>And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. <b>9 </b>And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. <b>10 </b>And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. <b>11 </b>For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. <b>12 </b>And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” <b>13 </b>And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>14 </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Glory to God in the highest,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”[</span><span style="color: #631e16; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">]</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>15 </b>When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” <b>16 </b>And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. <b>17 </b>And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. <b>18 </b>And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. <b>19 </b>But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. <b>20 </b>And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Luke 2:8-20English Standard Version (ESV)</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">The story itself, I love, not the least because it is, of course, the story that Linus recites in </span><i style="font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">A Charlie Brown Christmas</i><span style="font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">, when Charlie Brown despairs of ever finding the true meaning of Christmas. Dr. J, however, really, really, loves it, and said she could preach any number of sermons on it. This time she chose to focus on the latter half of verse nine “they were filled with great fear” and verses seventeen and twenty. The shepherds, despite being filled with great fear, spread the word about what they had seen and heard.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dr. J went on to use this story as scriptural proof that we need to be out there talking to people about Jesus, even though it is scary. She hears from so many members of the church that their way of witnessing is to do good things for others, not talking about Jesus, and she used the shepherd story to show that this attitude is “not scriptural”. The shepherds were afraid, but they went and spread their story anyway.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She went on to deal with the argument that “I don’t know a lot about Jesus”. She urged us to review the events of each day and look for places where Jesus could have been acting - the smile a stranger gave us, our not speaking up in a meeting when it wouldn’t have been advisable, finding our lost car keys.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Okay, that last one was mine. But by this time it had occurred to me that people with a story to tell, tell that story without urging. The shepherds saw a light from Heaven and heard an angelic voice, followed by an angelic choir. Do you think they needed prompting to tell that story? A few generations down the road their grandkids were probably saying “Not this again” at holiday dinners. The “Jesus helped me find my car keys” stories I see on Facebook don’t come close. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pastor J went on to say that if all we did was to do good for others, we would build an awesome life for people, but how would they ever hear about Jesus?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not seeing the problem here.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"It’s like we are saying to God, 'God, I’ll help you build your Kingdom, but I’m not willing to talk about you' . . . It’s easier to do good things for others than to talk about Jesus.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Okay, seriously? Has she not noticed that there are a lot of people in public life talking about Jesus, and that we still don’t have this paradise on earth she’s envisioning if we all substituted doing for talking, or for talking about what we are supposedly doing? Meantime, <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2014/10/family-values.html" target="_blank">my cousin Garett is still in Liberia</a>, as far as I know, and so are a lot of health workers who are risking their lives in a place where thousands of people have died of an incurable disease and she seriously wants me to think that that is easier than telling people about Jesus?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But I started off talking about #illridewithyou, so let me get back there. Suppose I were in Sydney and free to offer what escort service I could provide to someone in a headscarf. What would it sound like to that person for me to say, “I’m doing this because Jesus wants me to” or “I’m doing this to be Jesus to you today”. I know that Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, but would they take those statements as a sign that we have some beliefs in common or as a sign that I’m part of what they are afraid of? How much sensitivity to their fears would I be showing, and wouldn’t showing sensitivity to their fears be something Jesus might want me to do?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think if I were going to bring religion into it at all, it would be by listening. “I know a little about your religion, but probably only enough to get a lot of it wrong. What does the Quran say is the obligation of believers in a situation like this?” Maybe that would get us around to a discussion of our shared and disparate views of Jesus, maybe not. I’m having a hard time seeing how strangers offering friendship to other strangers in jeopardy is going to give Jesus a sad.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I imagine, though, if I were there ride sharing with people in jeopardy, eventually I would wind up with a story to tell: a story that one of them told me, a story about what it felt like, sharing non-privileged status with a stranger, a story of other strangers offering support.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">And as I said, people with a story to tell, tell that story without urging. Maybe that would have been a better message, to get out there in the world and do something, do more than you are doing now, do more than you think you can do. Sooner or later, you will have a story, and you will tell it.</span>Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-85556188085771339002014-10-09T09:56:00.000-07:002014-10-10T06:29:19.889-07:00Family Values<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
My cousin Garrett is in Liberia, helping people cope with the Ebola epidemic. Here he is being interviewed via Skype by a reporter at New York’s WPIX:</div>
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If that doesn't work, here is the URL:</div>
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http://pix11.com/2014/10/03/ebola-relief-worker-describes-liberia-situation/</div>
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By Miss Manners’ reckoning, Garett is my first cousin once removed; by my family’s traditions, he is my second cousin, and by the calling customs of my nieces and nephews, he’s my baby cousin, being the son of one of my first cousins and the grandson of my dad’s younger sister. I’m not entirely sure I ever met Garrett, unless it was at a barbecue his uncle held while I was in NY visiting my sister this past July. He and I are Facebook friends, but he doesn’t post much. I knew about this interview because his uncle and aunt posted the link to this interview on Facebook. We are all quite proud of him.</div>
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<a href="http://www.americares.org/">AmeriCares,</a> so their website tells me “is a non-profit emergency response and global health organization. In times of epic disaster or daily struggle, we deliver medical and humanitarian aid to people in need worldwide.” Garett is Vice President of Emergency Response, hence his trip to Liberia. His organization has been providing supplies that medical workers need in order to provide the care that they can without risking their own lives or infecting other patients.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>AmeriCares has scaled up its response by providing eight emergency shipments of essential medicines and personal protective wear to both Liberia and Sierra Leone to help treat Ebola patients and to provide protective gear for health workers facing great risks in trying to control the outbreak.</i></span></span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The shipments contained over 90,000 pairs of gloves, 88,000 face masks, and over 28,000 units of protective clothing including scrubs and disposable coveralls and gowns. Shipments of intravenous fluids to rehydrate Ebola patients have also been sent to Liberia and Sierra Leone.</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Now they are working on large shipments of bleach to be used in infection control. People find Ebola scary, and rightly so, but it isn’t an airborne virus. Catching it requires coming in contact with blood or other bodily fluids from an infected person, all too easy to do if the proper protective wear and disinfectants are not available, but preventable if they are. Ebola is also not necessarily a death sentence. If patients get symptomatic care (such as rehydration) to keep them alive until their immune systems kick in, it is possible to survive Ebola. It’s not the same as getting over the common cold, but there is no reason to shrug and say, “Oh, well, what can we do?” either.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So what can you do? Donate, obviously, if you possibly can. You can donate to AmeriCare <a href="https://secure.americares.org/site/Donation2?df_id=17876&17876.donation=form1"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">here</span></a>, but if any readers know of other reputable organizations working on Ebola relief efforts, go ahead and post about them in the comments.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you are the sort to pray, or send good thoughts, or use other blessing rituals to signify your solidarity with people going through bad times, yes, please do! Garrett is not involved in direct patient care and does not anticipate being in any danger, but there are the many medical workers, the patients themselves, their family members, and anyone with the potential to be infected to whom you can direct your efforts as well.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And go ahead and remember Garrett while you are at it, just in case. Because even if neither of us could pick the other one out of a police lineup, he’s family. Apparently, he’s one of the people who sees the rest of the world as family, too.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Update: More from Garrett here:</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-ingoglia/a-firsthand-account-of-li_b_5958884.html?utm_hp_ref=tw">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-ingoglia/a-firsthand-account-of-li_b_5958884.html?utm_hp_ref=tw</a></i></span></div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-58218439951125386022014-09-11T08:44:00.000-07:002014-09-11T15:05:56.332-07:00Happy Birthday, Elyse<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Today was Elyse’s birthday. I say “was” because Elyse is with us no more. She died on an April night at the age of 16 when a congenital aneurysm that no one knew she had ruptured. I knew her parents because I worked with her mother, and when I heard of Elyse’s death, I went to their house, where a large crowd had gathered to be of what comfort we could. Elyse was brain dead but being kept alive on life support so her organs could be donated. That was important to her parents, who were overcome when they learned Elyse’s heart was too damaged to be donated.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“She had a good heart,” I reminded her mom, one of those stupid, useless things you say when you want to be comforting but there are no words that can do that.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
My friend told stories. Elyse was a quiet elf of a child with an engaging grin. She had asthma, but like most teens, she wanted to fit in with her peers. So for months she did not tell her gym teacher about her condition. My friend told about how she learned that when the class had to run sprints, Elyse bravely puffed along, well behind everyone but willing to try. I could see her in my mind. It sounded like an Elyse thing to do.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I had to leave the next day for a planned visit to family, but my husband went to the funeral. He said it was crowded, and he was on a long line to see the family and pay his respects when another coworker saw him and took him on a shortcut through a side door. “The Bishop was there,” my friend told me when she returned to work weeks later. Seeing that Elyse’s father was the principal of one of the city’s Catholic schools, I didn’t find the Bishop’s attendance excessive, but I was glad that my friend had that comfort.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Five months later, on Elyse’s birthday, two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in New York City. Today everyone is remembering, and mourning, the people who died in that attack. It is appropriate that they do so.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
But I woke up this morning remembering a little blonde elf of a girl who will never be older than 16, and whose death was no less tragic.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Happy birthday, Elyse.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-53212653904676557812014-07-29T07:35:00.000-07:002014-07-29T07:35:33.371-07:00Like a Girl<i>I swear I used to be able to write poetry once. Maybe not very good poetry, but actual poetry. This one, inspired by the Always (Proctor and Gamble) "Like a Girl" ad campaign, is more like a really bad essay broken up into verses, but it's what I've got.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Jeanne.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was a peasant. She loved her country, </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She loved her church.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She led an army, and won a victory</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
And then another, </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Like a girl.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
When she was murdered,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
For so called witchcraft, </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
her fame outlived her.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Now she’s a saint</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Just like a girl.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Sacagawea.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was a teen.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was a mother.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She helped an expedition, </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Across the waters,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Across the mountains,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She guided the men,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Just like a girl.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Harriet.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was a slave,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Who found her way free.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
And she led others along a railroad,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Like a girl.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
They followed markers</div>
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They followed the North Star</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
They followed quilts displayed on clotheslines</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Made with stitches and patches</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
By many girls.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Florence.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She traveled with armies,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
To nurse the soldiers,</div>
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Injured in battles planned by old men.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She nursed the wounded,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She heard their screams</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was unflinching </div>
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When she came to tend them, </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Just like a girl.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Amelia.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She was a pilot,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She owned the sky.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
It wasn’t men’s then,</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
It belonged to anyone.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
So she explored it, </div>
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And tried to conquer it</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Just like a girl.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Her name was Rosa.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She rode a bus.</div>
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One day she planned it, </div>
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She kept her seat</div>
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When someone else demanded it.</div>
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She did not waiver.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
She sparked a movement,</div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Like a girl.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-90408415008368215612014-07-19T07:09:00.000-07:002014-07-19T07:09:02.258-07:00Half an Acre<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>I am holding half an acre<br />
Torn from the map of Michigan<br />
And folded in this scrap of paper<br />
Is a land I grew in</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>Think of every town you've lived in<br />
Every room, you lay your head<br />
And what is it that you remember?</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>Do you carry every sadness with you<br />
Every hour your heart was broken<br />
Every night the fear and darkness<br />
Lay down with you</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>A man is walking on the highway<br />
A woman stares out at the sea<br />
And light is only now just breaking</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>So we carry every sadness with us<br />
Every hour our heart were broken<br />
Every night the fear and darkness<br />
Lay down with us</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>But I am holding half an acre<br />
Torn from the map of Michigan<br />
I am carrying this scrap of paper</i></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px; text-align: center;">
<i>That can crack the darkest sky wide open<br />
Every burden taken from me<br />
Every night my heart unfolding<br />
My home</i></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
I first heard the song <i>Half an Acre</i> on a Liberty Mutual ad several years ago, and found it on iTunes and purchased it. It’s a haunting song, and still one of my favorites to listen to when the mood strikes.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
I have an inconvenient kind of mind, however. I can’t listen to words like “I am holding half an acre, torn from a map of Michigan” without thinking, “That must be one big-assed map.” I used to live in a house on a half acre lot. It seemed large enough when I was mowing the grass, even with a riding mower, but I if I look at a state map of Louisiana and try to pinpoint where that half-acre is, well, pinpoint is the operative term.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
So today for some reason I decided to figure out just how big-assed a map we are talking about. Google and I had a little sit down and I discovered that one half acre is 21, 780 square feet. Michigan covers an area of 96, 716 square <i>miles</i>. In case you are wondering, one square mile is the equivalent of 27, 878, 400 square feet. So half an acre is very roughly one one-thousandth of a square mile, and Michigan is roughly 96,000 square miles. If met calculations are correct, half an acre is roughly one 96-millionth the size of Michigan.</div>
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A pinpoint is looking a little large.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
And speaking of points, of course, the feasibility of holding a half-acre scrap torn from a map of Michigan is not the point of the song. I get that. The song is about fear, regret and disappointment, and how each of us needs a home place we can go to, even if only in our minds, when those threaten to overwhelm us. The scrap of paper is a metaphor for the half-acre more or less that we carry in our minds.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
The mind that in my case, can’t help asking, “But just how big is that scrap of paper?” Because asking such questions and tinkering and figuring out, that’s my home.</div>
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<div style="color: #003399; font-size: 16px;">
<span style="color: black;">Read more: <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/half-acre-lyrics-hem.html#ixzz37vD6inQr">Hem - Half Acre Lyrics | MetroLyrics</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sq5Bvvx5nc">listen here</a>.</span></div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-73041977797549989832014-07-15T07:48:00.000-07:002014-07-15T07:49:50.277-07:00Meta Mavis and Meta Tabitha Have a Chat about Their Authors<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Why do I smirk so much?” Mavis asked. “I’m not a particularly smug or supercilious person. Why can’t I have a shy smile, or a fond smile, or an occasional grin? Or a <i>moue? </i>A <i>moue</i> in the sense of a flirtatious pout would be awesome,<i> </i>although<i> </i>a few grimaces of distaste for Mikhail and his roaming hands during the judges’ comments would have been okay, too. Why can’t I have a <i>moue</i>?” </div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“I don’t know. I’ve been pretty much banished from existence until my recent engagement.” Tabitha flashed her ring in the light from the window of Mavis’s condo. “I’m not in a position to understand current authorial conventions in fanfiction.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“That’s true. I’m glad you’re back, actually. I was getting tired of all the drama with Karl.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Drama? With Karl? My Karl? How do you have drama with Karl?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“I’m supposed to be secretly in love with him.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Tabitha trilled merry peals of laughter. “Oh God. Why am I trilling merry peals of laughter instead of laughing like a normal human?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“I don’t know. Maybe our author has been reading attemps at Regency fiction. Or getting into the Denim Vodka.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“The Denim Vodka doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Tabitha smirked. “Wait a minute. Now I’m doing it, too. Why am I smirking?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Our author got tired of writing ‘said’, I think.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Now I really need the vodka. You?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“I can’t. I’m pregnant.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Again? Isn’t that like the third time this month? Maybe you should sue the people who make your NuvaRing. <span style="color: #323333;">Is Mikhail with you this time, or did you throw him out thinking you weren’t worldly enough for him?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“It’s not Mikhail.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Karl? <i>My</i> Karl?”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Mavis hung her head in shame. “It wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t even Karl’s idea. One minute I was giving him an affectionate peck on the cheek to congratulate him on your engagement, the next minute my lips were on his and before I knew it, I was doing something called ‘deepening the kiss’.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Better than smiling/groaning/moaning into his mouth, I guess. But you didn’t get pregnant from kissing.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“No, next thing I know I was on the kitchen counter and we were deepening something else.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“On the counter?”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Yes, and I had left a corkscrew on it, too. Ouch.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“I can’t wait until some of our authors get older, gain a little experience, and see the advantage of mattresses,” Tabitha sighed. “We have a new one.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Sleep Number or Tempur-pedic?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Sleep Number with a memory foam top. So what are we going to do about the baby?</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“You’re going to run me out of town. Wait, is that ‘you’re’ or ‘your’? You are going to run me out of town, I’m going to convince Mikhail that the child is his, and for about a decade I will tolerate a loveless marriage in which we have two more children.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“Mikhail can’t count to nine?” Tabitha said off-handedly while trying to fit “Mikhail”, “Mavis” and “loveless marriage” into one coherent sentence. She gave up.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“It’s the accent. Accents automatically remove 15 IQ points. Unless they’re French.”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
“How about if you tell Karl about the baby, I bow out gracefully, and Mikhail and I go through a few bottles of Denim Vodka and have drunken sex?”</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">“Suit yourself. Just so you won’t be too disappointed, let me warn you. He wasn’t joking about the hat.”</span>Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-16350519552624686822014-07-02T06:12:00.000-07:002014-07-07T17:32:14.231-07:00Girl at the End of the World<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
For I don’t know how long I have been seeing this picture on Patheos when reading the several blogs I follow there. It looked interesting, but I wasn’t particularly moved to read the book. </div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.elizabethesther.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Girl-at-the-End-of-the-World.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.elizabethesther.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Girl-at-the-End-of-the-World.jpg" height="320" width="207" /></a></div>
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<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Then one of the bloggers I follow on twitter retweeted something that sounded interesting from someone called Elizabeth Esther, and I began following Elizabeth Esther, too. I shortly discovered that Elizabeth Esther is the author of <i>Girl at the End of the World</i>, so I decided that if I could find it at the library, I’d read it. A trip to our library’s website revealed that yes, they had the book (2 copies), I could put a hold on one and have it sent to the library closest to me, and a few days later, there it was. Forty some odd years ago when I got my first (barcodeless, cardboard) EBR Parish Library card, I did not envision such efficiency. Now I’m looking forward to the day when a drone drops the book off at my door.</div>
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The book is a memoir of the author’s upbringing in an Apocalyptic church, one started and run by her own family. </div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I was raised in a homegrown, fundamentalist Christian group—which is just a shorthand way of saying I’m classically trained in apocalyptic stockpiling, street preaching, and the King James Version of the Bible. I know hundreds of obscure nineteenth-century hymns by heart and have such razor sharp “modesty vision” that I can spot a miniskirt a mile away.</i><i>Verily, verily I say unto thee, none of these highly specialized skills ever got me a job, but at least I’m all set for the end of the world. Selah.</i></span></blockquote>
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This excerpt from the back cover sums up both the book’s content and the author’s breezy style, a style that covers a world of heartbreak. In one sense the book is an easy read: it’s written simply, there are no mind boggling statistics or difficult academic concepts to absorb, and it’s broken into short chapters. In another sense, the book is a difficult read, as books about abuse and suffering always are, especially if any of it happens to resonate with some of the reader’s own experiences. Rachel Held Evans described the book as, “the sort of book you plan to read in a week but finish in a day.” My experience was the opposite: I planned to read it in a day but had to keep putting it down because it got to be too much, so it took me closer to three.</div>
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Part of what made the book so difficult for me was that the author does not belabor her experiences. Her matter of fact style in describing what she went through (multiple daily spankings, being made to quit an after school activity she loved and needed to get into a private college because it interfered with her numerous chores at home, having a teacher question her science project because when she measured her resting heart rate it was over 100) more than anything she actually says conveys how the bizarre can seem normal when you are raised with it.</div>
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In the end, Elizabeth Esther was able to make her way out of the cult she was brought up in, find a new way of living with her husband and children, and even make peace of a sort with her parents. I find it interesting that for her, finding her way to the Catholic Church was part of her healing path. My relationship with my stepmother was a stormy one, but the one thing I am immensely grateful for is that she sent me to a Methodist church and not the Catholic one I had been baptized into. Well, that, and <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/cliche.html" target="_blank">the whole saving my life thing</a>, but it’s pretty much a toss-up in my eyes.</div>
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Fortunately, neither Elizabeth Esther nor I are tasked with selecting each other’s spiritual path, and her reasons for becoming attracted to Catholicism make perfect sense to me, even if it’s a path I wouldn’t have chosen. In the end, that’s what makes the book so heartening, the message that we can overcome childhood brainwashing (the author’s own term, from the Prologue) and look at the world through our own eyes. I do recommend reading the book, whether in a day or three or even a week. </div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-45787342329421965102014-06-18T18:10:00.000-07:002014-06-19T06:55:40.272-07:00My Own Abbreviations<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Things I write out the long way frequently online, and wish other people knew my abbreviations for:</div>
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ICBWAT - <i>I could be wrong about that</i>, mostly written when I’m sure I’m not.</div>
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IWBIWFU - <i>It’s weird, but it works for us</i>, needed since my husband and I are strange.<br />
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ETA: I suppose you could also use IWBIWFM - <i>It’s weird, but it works for me.</i></div>
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YWNGTC - <i>You would not get the chance, </i>my (usually unspoken) response to IWHI, for <i>I would hit it</i> posts on TD. (Yeah, I don’t post much there anymore.)</div>
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WMYTYGTC - <i>What makes you think you’d get the chance?</i> See above.</div>
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So does anyone else have their own unique abbreviations? Feel free to add them in the comments.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-77561974100453847912014-06-18T09:14:00.001-07:002014-06-18T20:49:36.531-07:00It Rained on My Birthday<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
At least, it rained all morning long. Having just turned 67, I can be philosophical about rain on my birthday, but we had a lot of errand running to do, and the heavy rain made it inconvenient. We were going to go pick up my birthday cake and a few odds and ends at Whole Foods, and then go see <i>Maleficent</i>, at my request.</div>
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John thought there was an early showing of <i>Maleficent</i>, but it turned out that that was for Saturday only, as I found out after he dropped me as closely as he could to the theater before going to park the car.</div>
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He always does that. When it’s raining, he drops me off as close as he can to wherever we are going, parks the car, then braves the rain on his own. When we are done, he goes to get the car while I wait until again, he gets as close as he can to pick me up. He has done that for as long as we’ve been together.</div>
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So we decided to go see if the cake is ready early. As I waited inside the door for John to finish parking the car, I saw the fresh flower display. I picked out a combination to make myself a bouquet with, and when my husband found me there, I announced that we were buying me flowers. He didn’t argue over that, or the bag of mix and match cookies that I added to the cake, milk, and rosewater that we went there for originally.</div>
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The reason I am dwelling on the cookies, the flowers, and the rain is because ever since <i>DWTS</i> ended, I have had romance on my mind. Well, not so much on my mind, but it’s been on the minds of the young fangirls I hang out with on Tumblr, as they review every look, gesture, hug, and sentence that occurred between “Mavis” and “Mikhael” throughout the season. I frequently see things like, “I want someone who holds me like that” or “I want someone to tell me, ‘I don’t need you to be better. I need you to be you and I’ll do better.’ ” Sometimes it’s, “I won’t settle for anyone who doesn’t look at me like that.”</div>
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I appear to be the only one who gets an entirely different lesson from these last several weeks, the lesson that goes, “It has never occured to me to tell my husband ‘I don’t need you to be better. I need you to be you[rself] and I’ll do better.’ I bet he’d love to hear that.”</div>
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I’m not sure about the lovestruck gaze. I think if he caught me gazing at him like that, he’d assume I was having a neurological event and rush me to the emergency ward. But he might like it if I could at least refrain from rolling my eyes when he launches into another story about his latest day of dam inspections.</div>
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Of course, I have been on the other side of this situation: accepting crumbs and trying to convince myself that they were true love. I understand the younger ladies of my internet acquaintance who are shaping their views of what it is possible and reasonable to expect in a relationship. I’m glad they are determined not to sell themselves short just to have a man* in their lives.</div>
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I hope though, that life will broaden their views of what constitutes not selling themselves short. I may have to pick out my own birthday flowers at the grocery store, but I don’t have to wade through a rainy parking lot to get the car. My husband may not send moony-eyed looks in my direction, but he <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2012/05/vignette-involving-my-husband.html">will do battle with my problems with only a plastic teaspoon</a>, if need be.</div>
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So maybe I don’t need him to be better. Maybe I just need him to be himself, and I’ll be better. </div>
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Or maybe we could both just be ourselves, because we seem to like each other that way.</div>
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*or woman, but I associate the kind of “you need one, so do what it takes to get one” thinking with advice pressed on heterosexual women. I could be wrong about that.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-54686221388325434092014-06-02T10:27:00.000-07:002014-07-13T07:00:41.420-07:00Hospitality<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
The ironclad rule of Southern Ladyhood Hospitality, or so I have gleaned from polling everyone that I knew would agree with me, is that if you really want to invite someone, whether to an event or just to hang out, is you do it yourself. You don’t necessarily have to send a handwritten note: a card, a phone call, even a text message is fine. Secondhand invitations, we all agreed, are out, even if they come via a close family member, like, just to use an example pulled out of thin air, a son.</div>
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Okay, in other, totally unrelated news: we had a visit from my son, his GF, and my steppish (to use my son’s term) grandson over Memorial Day weekend. They were actually in town for Neal’s stepmom’s family get-together, but they stayed with us because his stepmom ran out of room. They also extended their stay a few extra days to have time to spend with us. Yay! Having a four year old underfoot is more exhausting than I remembered from my days when I worked with them for half an hour at a time and then handed them back to their moms, but it was fun, too, and way too quiet when he left. I am just now getting to the point where I don’t hear the little one’s voice around the house and remember his shampoo and toothpaste smell. We took him to the aquarium in New Orleans and to the local park, which has a Splash Pad, read a lot of books, and patronized a few local restaurants. We also had "quiet time" (a euphemism for nap time) at home, which Nonna needed, whether Ace did or not.</div>
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Four year olds are fun, if wearing. Like his coevals, Ace asks a lot of why questions. He also talks right over the answers, usually with another why question. My attempts to answer his questions were frequently punctuated by low-voiced utterances of “Mom” by my son, when he deemed my answers too complex, too abrupt, too God-knows-what, leading me to finally complain to my husband, “If that little brat doesn’t quit his whining, I’m going to smack him one. Thank goodness that at least the four-year-old knows how to behave.” </div>
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One of the “why” questions I did not have a satisfactory answer for is why I didn’t go with them to Neal’s dad’s house to go swimming. When they first arrived, Neal told me that his stepsister had told him that I was welcome to come to her house to swim with them so I could spend more time with Ace. He understood why I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I told him I like his stepmother and stepsister, and to say I appreciated the offer, but that John and I also needed some alone time anyway, since John had just come in from an out of town trip and was preparing for another one.</div>
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Ace, however, did not understand why I didn’t just come along with them every time they went. I could hardly tell a four year old the real reason that I don’t want to be around my son’s dad, and it was hard to say no to meltingly brown eyes, so this rapidly became a small problem in an otherwise enjoyable visit.</div>
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My son finally admitted on their last day that Ace had been overhearing his stepmother keep telling Neal that he was welcome to bring us along with him to play in the pool, and that Ace had overheard. In addition to being eternal askers of “why”, four year olds are the original pitchers that have big ears. Don’t say anything in front of them that you don’t want repeated, and repeated, and repeated elsewhere.</div>
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Which reminds me: I did, despite my son’s lack of faith in my ability to understand four year olds, get to babysit for Ace while my son and his intended went out to dinner. I’m not sure of all of what I said to the little one before he finally fell asleep, but I bet it made for some merry conversation on the four hour drive back to Houston.</div>
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But at least I wasn’t there to hear, “Mom!”</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-56659904163472179032014-05-22T06:37:00.000-07:002014-05-30T03:32:25.481-07:00Real Fiction<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
A long-time reader, lsn, left a comment on my recent post, <i>The Hour That the Ship Comes In</i> that reminded me of a recent conversation on Tumblr. </div>
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First, lsn’s comment:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>OK... there's fan fic about reality TV?!?<br /> </i><i><br /></i><i>
Oh Lord.</i><i><br /></i><i>
I honestly had no idea... I kind of get the reasoning behind fanfic about fictional characters, but writing it about actual human beings who are not in fact fictional characters no matter how much the editing does kind of is a bit... well, icky to me.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #232323;">Now the Tumblr conversation.</span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px;"> </span>The first commenter has extensive interests (and over 1,000 followers) including WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, an admittedly scripted form of wrestling in which the wrestlers, while real athletes, play characters. <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2011/07/heroes.html">Grandma D</a> would have been a huge fan.) I’m not familiar with the second person, but she seems to be another wrestling fan.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><u>Person A:</u>….are wrestlers fictional characters?</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><u>Person B</u>:i’d say yes, generally. though it’s a question i find very interesting.</i><i>the distinction is easier to make with some wrestlers than others. the undertaker, bray wyatt, and other similar characters are obviously fictional. at the other…</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><u>Person A</u>:It always trips me up. Like, calling an Actor their characters is kinda rude and just plain weird. But then if you call a wrestler their birth name, that’s disrespectful.</i><i>It’s kinda like you read my mind and put my thoughts in a post. Lol.</i></span></blockquote>
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My response, which I suspect neither of them noticed, was as follows:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I don’t think real-fictional is a binary; I think that there is a continuum from real to fiction and that we all position ourselves at different points along it depending on who we interact with. So an actor playing a role is further along the continuum toward fiction than the wrestler is, but even the actor is calling on some of his/her real self in playing the part. (Shoot, some actors play themselves over and over.) I was present at a reading that Attica Locke (fantastic author, BTW) gave and she began by saying, “I’m going to be real”, and I thought “no, you’re not”, not because I thought she was lying, but because simply using the phrase reflects an awareness that we present ourselves in different ways in different situations, so she had to pull up “real” from the pool of potential personas, and how real is that, when you think about it? </i></span></blockquote>
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We all have ways of presenting ourselves that involve some to a lot of artifice, and we all recognize that other people have ways of presenting themselves that involve some to a lot of artifice.</div>
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So let’s take that idea further in dealing with lsn’s point, the ickiness of writing about “actual human beings who are not fictional characters.” Actual human beings have been known to Google their own names and can easily find said fanfic, and might be a bit nonplussed to discover that their significant others have been vanished down a rabbit hole, their sexual orientations have undergone wholesale revisions, or that they are now either pregnant or about to be fathers.</div>
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We present ourselves with various degrees of reality/unreality, but we also see other people the same way. To me, being able to see other people as being as real as ourselves, as the stars of their own lives and not bit players in our own, is the biggest task of growing up. I think we have all had the experience of working or going to school with or living next to someone that we see purely as a PITA, and then one day get that one glimpse or one bit of information that makes their behavior make sense from their point of view. I remember one summer working with two other therapists in a social skills group for teens. One particular young lady was causing me a lot of frustration with her constant talking and inability to stay on topic. Finally one of the other therapists told me that the young lady had recently been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and placed on medication, and was only now starting to talk in social situations at all. Oh! So the training wheels had just come off the bike and she was naturally still a little wobbly. I could deal with that. After all, that was my role in the group in the first place, teaching conversational rules.</div>
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Sometimes our only way of knowing particular people is through them being presented to us as entertainment. We see them on television in reality shows that are carefully contrived and we read about them in magazines that are designed to entertain. So what we get is fiction, not complete fiction, but somewhere along that continuum between fiction and reality. The distinction between the person I call Mikhail and Jane Austin's Mr. Darcy is blurrier than the distinction between Mr. Darcy and the young man in the next seat in English class, or the teacher presenting the lesson. It’s one small step from fanfiction about Mr. Darcy to fanfiction about Mikhail.</div>
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And unless teen girls have changed even more than I think between my days in high school and now, one more small step from fanfiction about Mikhail to fiction probably not published on the internet about the young man in the next seat in English class, or maybe even about the teacher presenting the lesson. A girl can dream after all.</div>
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A girl can dream, and then write about it.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-10633448402230793852014-05-19T11:08:00.001-07:002014-05-20T08:27:11.442-07:00Insulted<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
In my reading recently I came across this post, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2014/05/patriarchy-in-homeschool-culture/"><i>Patriarchy in Homeschool Culture</i></a> by Samantha Fields, in which I found a quote from the book <i>Beautiful Girlhood</i>.<i> Beautiful Girlhood </i>was originally written by Mabel Hale and published in 1922, and has been more recently revised by Karen Andreola and republished.</div>
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The section that Samantha quoted went as follows:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One day a handsome young gentleman alighted from a train … As he paced the platform, he soon attracted the attention of a young girl. She watched him flirtatiously out of the corner of her eye, coughed a little, and laughed merrily and a bit loudly with a group of her acquaintances; but at first he paid no attention …<br />At last he noticed, turned, and came directly to her, while her foolish little heart was all in a flutter at her success …<br />“My dear girl, he said, tipping his hat, “have you a mother at home?”<br />“Why, yes,” the girl stammered.<br />“Then go to her and tell you to keep you with her until you learn how you ought to behave in a public place,” and saying this he turned and left her in confusion and shame. It was a hard rebuke; but this man had told her only what every pure-minded man and woman was thinking. Girls can hardly afford to call down upon themselves such severe criticism. (130-31)</span></blockquote>
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This is where a wide reading of true mid-nineteenth century literature comes in handy for a girl. Let me tell you the rest of the story, without the flowery prose (okay, maybe a little flowery prose).</div>
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The young girl immediately got the attention of the conductor and pointed to the offender saying, “Excuse me, sir, but that <i>person</i>, while unacquainted with me, presumed to come up to me and address me with words that insulted both my mother and myself. I trust I can rely on your protection from any further advances on his part.”</div>
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I mean, seriously? Let's look at the sequence of events as presented, shorn of any editorial content designed to influence our views of who is at fault here. A young man alights from the train, sees a bevy of attractive young ladies, and begins to pace around the platform. Why is he pacing? Whether he is waiting for another train, or a cab, or his valet to come and get him, the wait won't be made any shorter by him walking up and down. He sees a group of acquaintances, including one particular young lady, and <i>attracts her attention</i>. Is this the purpose of his pacing? It would seem so to an observer not inclined to blame the woman in any interaction between a woman and a man.<br />
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But then, what does the young lady do? She laughs merrily at something that one of her acquaintances says. Obviously she's a strumpet, or wait, here's another thought. Maybe the group has noticed the young man's efforts to get her attention and one of them has said something amusing about him. And now she's laughing at him! So he does what he can to preserve his pride: make it seem like she's the one trying to attract his attention, and insult her for it.<br />
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I mean, otherwise we'd have to believe that this paragon of male virtue presumed to approach and address a young lady without a proper introduction just to correct her manners. He’d be lucky not to be horsewhipped. Young Victorian ladies suffered from a lot of disadvantages, true, but a lack of ways to deal with insults from young popinjays was not one of them.</div>
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As the authors would have known if they had bothered to read good literature instead of writing the bad kind.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-41944117002086579642014-05-17T07:08:00.000-07:002014-06-14T13:00:33.023-07:00Inspire<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Going into the final on <i>Dancing With the Stars</i>, there are two Olympic athletes left among the four finalists, ice dancer Meryl Davis and Paralympic Team snowboarder Amy Purdy. Amy is a double amputee, having had to have both legs amputated below the knee due to a bacterial infection she acquired at age 19. Her accomplishments to date as an athlete, actress, and activist for people with disablities would be impressive for anyone, amputee or not.</div>
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Something that bothers me about people’s reactions to Amy, though, is that I keep hearing variants of “If she can do it, anybody can,” for instance, in the way that guest judge Abby Lee Miller used Purdy as a model for her students:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Amy Purdy and Derek Hough performed a breathtaking, creative, precise Argentine tango using a bar stool as a prop. The judges struggled to put into words how impressed they were with both the execution and the effort. Miller said to her girls in the audience, “I better never hear ‘I’m too tired, I’m hungry, I have homework.” Judge Bruno Tonioli said it had power, control, precision, and immersion into the character. It also had a perfect score of 40.<br /><span style="color: black;">Read more at <a href="http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainment/tv-cable-streaming-video/dance-mom-vs-maks-smackdown-on-dancing-with-the-stars-16891/#OHGuuYiWB6cmqsc4.99">http://www.commdiginews.com/entertainment/tv-cable-streaming-video/dance-mom-vs-maks-smackdown-on-dancing-with-the-stars-16891/#OHGuuYiWB6cmqsc4.99</a></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: black;">No matter how well Purdy danced, people (including Purdy, who has been showing a good bit of stress in some of her video rehearsal packages) get hungry, they get tired, and if they are in school, they get homework. </span>I don’t like it when people who don’t belong to a particular group pick a person who is an outlier in that group and then hold that person up as a model. First of all, it is unrealistic, and second of all, it detracts from that particular person’s accomplishments. Not every amputee can become an Olympic snowboarder, any more than every person can become an Olympian. And amputees who struggle more than Purdy does deserve empathy and help, not to have one person’s experience held up to them as the norm. What Amy Purdy has accomplished represents not only a great deal of work and determination, but also a great deal of talent, talent that did not disappear when her legs did. So while I admire her tremendously, and understand why people are inspired by her, I am not about to point her out as an example of how anybody can succeed by putting their mind to it. She is not just anybody. That’s the point of having competitions.</div>
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Then there is the whole problem of using Amy as inspiration. The word in its many forms comes up over and over again in the judges comments on her dancing: you’re so inspiring. You are such an inspiration. I’m sure people are inspired by her, but I see a difference between “I’m inspired by you” and “You’re such an inspiration” in that to me, the latter objectifies Amy. It’s one thing to derive life lessons from watching how other people cope with hardship. But Amy Purdy is a unique person. She’s the star of her own life, not a bit player in someone else’s. To reduce her from the woman who has been honest about her fears and struggles as well as her pride in her performance to an object lesson for others is to reduce her to just that: an object. </div>
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Of course, I am writing this as a person who is not an amputee and doesn’t have other orthopedic disabilities. Sure, I’m getting older and have Meniere’s disease and arthritis, but if you were going to draw a line between “able-bodied” (to use an older term) and not, I’d fall on the “able-bodied” side of the line. So it is quite possible that my take on this is far, far from what I would think if I were an amputee, or had Cerebral Palsy or MS or Parkinson’s Disease. Maybe if I did, I’d be happy to be an inspiration to somebody, although my hunch is, if it were me, my conduct would be far from inspiring. If anyone who does have experience with these conditions is reading this and has a completely different take on it, feel free to chime in in the comments. You won’t hurt my feelings, unless maybe you begin a comment with “Listen, you idiot.” (OTOH, I’ve heard worse.)</div>
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Until then, my take on it is going to be that Amy Purdy is an athlete who can do a lot of things the majority of us cannot do. I admire her, but I’m not going to run right out and take up snowboarding because of her example, and not just because I live where it doesn’t snow.</div>
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<span style="color: #323333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">And when it comes to dancing? I’m sorry, but Meryl Davis can dance rings around her, and I don’t think it’s just because of the legs. So while I admire Amy Purdy, I am pulling (and voting) for Davis. Sometimes, despite drive and hard work and determination, it does come down to a matter of talent.</span><br />
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ETA, on June 14, 2014: I found out today, via a Facebook link from a friend, that Stella Young, a comedian and disability activist, doesn't like to be referred to as an inspiration, as her use of the term <i>inspiration porn</i> makes clear <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K9Gg164Bsw">in this video</a>. She makes the same point about objectification as I do, only a lot clearer and better.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-65063027532769669962014-04-28T16:52:00.000-07:002014-05-01T18:18:46.315-07:00The Hour That The Ship Comes In<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
So while we are on the subject of my recent and inappropriate enthusiasm for a certain reality show, I have more to say about the subject of its surrounding fanfiction. What I should be doing at the moment is straightening up the house, getting my car inspected, and making the animated computer version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm that I promised my grandson. Yes, I know there are many animated versions I can buy him, but I want to personalize it by inserting pictures of him into the animations. That’s a lot of painstaking work, however, and this is easier.</div>
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Before I launch into my comments on the subject at hand, however, I am going to give the cast of characters a whole new set of names, because I feel uncomfortable using the names of the real people whom I don’t even know to discuss the fictional representations of them out there in cyberspace. So we have Carl and Mavis, recent gold medal winners in the sport of ice dancing, and Tabitha, Carl’s long suffering love interest, who has until recently been shoved so far into the background that her clothing was starting to match the decor. More recently we have Mikhail, Mavis’ foreign born dance instructor, with his burly good looks and total lack of concept of personal space. Supposedly he has been nicknamed “sex on a stick”, but to me that sounds downright uncomfortable. Then we have Mikhail’s brother Vadim, and Carl’s dance instructor, Shirley, who may or may not make an appearance, depending on how far I get before the siren song of filing medical papers gets to me.</div>
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If we go back far enough, much of the fiction involves romantic relationships between Carl and Mavis, despite the fact that they have been pretty clear about their lack of interest in one another. The Problem of Tabitha is dealt with in several ways. The most popular one seems to be just disappearing her off the face of the earth. As far as I can figure, she was the victim of an accident involving the Large Hadron Collider, details of which are still highly classified. With no Tabitha around, dramatic tension must come from the tried and true trope of having both characters fall in love with each other, but be afraid to speak out because each thinks the other is not interested. In real life, this rarely happens, but in novels, it happens all the time. In my view, if two people are in love but can’t tell each other, it is just as well, because they really have no business breeding together. I find these plots the least interesting of all.</div>
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Then there are the ones where we still have Carl and Mavis in love with each other, but Tabitha is Carl’s girlfriend. Yes, I know, you ask why he doesn’t break up with Tabitha and announce his love for Mavis if that is the case. Cake, snack, gone anyone? Or Tabitha is a lovely girl, and it would be a shame to hurt her (only in some of these stories, she and Carl get married, have a kid or two, and then get divorced, and wouldn’t it have been less hurtful to have dropped her like a hot rock before all that happened?) I wonder if the authors (who in many cases are good writers, in the technical sense) are aware of how much of a loser Mavis looks like in these stories. In real life, “Carl” has been with “Tabitha” for five years, more than enough time for Mavis to grieve a broken heart if she does have one, and then move on.</div>
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I wonder why none of our budding authors has come up with the obvious solution for the Tabitha problem - have Mikhail seduce her. He’s supposed to be good at that kind of thing. Then Mavis and Carl can bond over their mutual broken hearts. (No, I’m not writing it.)</div>
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There is also the little detail that Mavis had a boyfriend prior to and around the time of the Olympics. Then, around late February, even the briefest of references to him disappeared from her conversation and she and Mikhail are acting as though she is free as a bird. Maybe the BF, who does not have a name so lets call him Feliks, was the one who got disappeared in the Large Hadron Collider.</div>
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Or, there is the possible solution that I dreamed up for the first of my fanfic forays, the one in which Mikhail and Mavis get introduced online well before the Olympics, and he is the BF she refers to, until it becomes more politic to pretend that their first IRL meeting in the dance studio is their first meeting ever. It explains a lot: their immediate comfort level with each other, the boyfriend that was and then wasn’t, Mikhail’s proposal. Okay, it’s unlikely, but not as unlikely as two people who have known each other for a decade and a half falling in love but never bothering to mention it to each other, because plot.</div>
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And speaking of plots, I need to get back to Old MacDonald. That one, I understand.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(The title of this piece comes from <a href="http://vimeo.com/45730685">this song</a>, which has been stuck in my head for a while, but has nothing to do with the kind of ships that show up in fanfic.)</i></span></div>
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Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-41806327289104985522014-04-28T12:44:00.001-07:002014-04-28T12:44:24.950-07:00Fangirl<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
A few weeks ago, I turned the channel to ABC to watch <i>Castle</i>, and since I was a minute or two early, caught the very end of <i>Dancing With the Stars</i>. I had never before watched an episode of <i>Dancing With the Stars</i>, or of <i>The Voice</i>, <i>America’s Got Talent</i>, or <i>American Idol</i>. The reality TV shows I watch involve interior design, hoarders, or an occasional episode of <i>Design Star</i> when my husband happens to be watching. I did watch a whole season of <i>The Bachelorette</i> years ago with one of my AFS daughters, but couldn’t last through one episode of <i>Survivor</i>.</div>
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I did see enough of the <i>Dancing With The Stars</i> episode to find out that America’s favorite ice dancing couple, Meryl Davis and Charlie White were contestants, so I started looking for videos of their dances on YouTube, while using the first few Monday nights to follow the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, and of course the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final, or at least as much of it as I could stand before it became sadly evident that Kentucky was going down to UConn. </div>
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That meant that it was not until two weeks ago, Disney night, that I actually sat through an entire episode of <i>DWTS</i>. However, I was up to speed on the prior weeks’ actions, gossip, scores, and innuendo through a network of fangirls posting on Tumblr, and the links they posted with regularity.</div>
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In addition to the actions, gossip, scores, and innuendo, I also found my way to a whole lot of fanfiction. I actually found my way to the fanfiction by googling “Meryl and Maks fanfiction”, much as it pains me to admit it. I mean, I am really too old for this stuff. I am especially too old to write the two examples of it that I did, and submitted to one of the fangirls I follow, who posts her own and others’ submissions on her blog. No, I won’t say where.</div>
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I can understand the allure of shipping for the young ladies whose Tumblr blogs I follow. Most of them are in their teens to twenties (hence, young enough to be my granddaughters), and for them, learning the nuances of personal interaction is a developmental task. That look that Maks gave Meryl? Is that the lingering gaze of love or just Maks being Maks? When Charlie smiles upon hearing praise for Meryl’s chemistry with Maks, is that a real smile, or does it not make it all the way to his eyes? (Or is it Charlie thinking for the 35th time, “I wish they’d stop cutting to me every damn time Meryl dances”?) What does it mean if Meryl posts a picture of her and Charlie skating on Instagram? What does it mean if members of The Fam post “like” to pictures of Meryl and Charlie skating on Instagram?</div>
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I read these posts and think what they are really asking is “What does it mean when that guy in Chem class looks at me while the teacher is lecturing?” “Is that guy I friend zoned really just joking about us going to the prom together or is he hurt that I won’t date him?”</div>
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(Yes, I know that is not all that they are doing. The functions of fiction are too many and too complex to be summed up in one blog post, especially one of my blog posts, but this is the one that jumped out at me.)</div>
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And what does it mean that Coleslaw is pondering and writing about this stuff when she has ironing to finish and a house to clean before her brother shows up for his annual visit one week from today? (Thereby causing her to miss next week’s episode of DWTS, since we are taking him on an overnight to Natchez.)</div>
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I <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2009/12/reindeer-games.html">wrote once before</a> about the strategies that people use both to conceal information that might be hurtful <i>and</i> to tease that exact information out of the carefully phrased statements that other people make to hide it. There is an arms race going on between our need to fit harmoniously into a group and our need for information. The folk wisdom of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” always clashes with “forewarned is forearmed”. So we study other people’s body posture, facial expressions, eye gaze, and gestures; parse their sentences for hidden meanings, and at the same time strive to keep our own faces neutral and our words tempered. As important as it is to do so in everyday interactions, or job interviews, or if, heaven forbid, ever dealing with the police, it is even more important to be able to do so in matters of the heart. There is a saying, “wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve” for a reason, and that heart is not safe out there. </div>
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So I would like to say that my reasons for obsessively looking for updates on the sites I am following are purely high minded, that I am exploring my fascination with the ways in which people communicate. I would like to say that, but who am I kidding? </div>
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I don’t even know what my reasons are for following DWTS, except one. I’m a fangirl.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-12872730392498324322014-04-18T04:43:00.000-07:002014-04-18T13:39:04.886-07:00That's One Mystery Cleared Up<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
I’m feeling sad, queasy and perplexed. </div>
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Last summer I came home from vacation to find a message from the Judicial Process Department of the sheriff’s office on my door. A long account can be found <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2013/07/phone-tag-is-murder.html">here</a>, but the short version is that I was supposed to be served with a subpoena for a Dr. Coleslaw in a murder case, and after they had made three tries to deliver it, it was sent back to the originator per protocol. I’m not Dr. Anybody, I knew nothing about a murder, so the process server and I concluded it was all a mistake.</div>
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It occurred to me a few days later that while I honestly didn’t know anything specific about a murder, I had known someone who became a murder (and child abuse) <i>victim</i>, a child client of the place where I used to work. I wasn’t the child’s regular therapist, but a nagging voice in the back of my head reminded me that I may have done the child’s intake evaluation. I honestly couldn’t see how that would shed any light on the death itself, though, so I let it go.</div>
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Then the day before yesterday I heard the doorbell ring. And ring, and ring, and ring, because it was my husband ringing it, and he wanted to get back to cutting the grass before the light failed, and his leaning on the doorbell would of course make me able to exceed the speed of sound while getting to the door. I was not in a good mood when I flung it open, but cut off what I was about to say when my husband pointed to a gentleman next to him and said, “This man wants to talk to you,” before going back to the lawnmower.</div>
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I have finally trained hubby to protect me from sales calls, on the phone or in person, so I figured that wasn’t it. No, the gentleman, let’s call him Gabe*, was an investigator needing to talk to me about a murder case, specifically the case of the child I had been thinking about.</div>
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I can’t really go into any details because it involves confidential information. Let’s just say that Gabe works for the defense attorney, and his questions led me to suspect what defense strategy may be employed and why my assessment of the child’s language abilities may be pertinent to it.</div>
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Yuck.</div>
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I get that everyone is entitled to a defense in court. I wouldn’t want to live in a country where this was not true. I get that in a case where it is clear who committed the crime, the defense can only take the form of extenuating circumstances, and that may involve blaming the victim in some way. (That, or the “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” defense, which doesn’t work too well if you punched someone.)</div>
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But I still just want to cry, and then take a shower with steel wool, and then cry some more.</div>
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The mystery was intriguing and kind of fun.</div>
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The reality is, a child is dead.</div>
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*Gabe de Gator was the safety mascot of a company that my ex worked for years ago, so Gabe seems like a good name for an investi<b>gator</b>. Hey, whimsey is a good coping mechanism right now.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-37011184730503212462014-04-14T11:34:00.000-07:002014-04-14T11:34:00.844-07:00You've Got a Friend<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
Saturday the St. Anonymous UMW went to Oak Alley for a tour and lunch. My good friend D was able to come with me. As I mentioned <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2014/01/real.html">the one other time it was relevant to whatever story I was telling</a>, D is African American, whereas I am of European (mostly Italian, with a little Yugoslavian thrown in) descent.</div>
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We had a good time touring the old mansion. The tour guide was very well-versed in the home’s history and had an infectious personality. (At the end of the tour, she told us she had quit teaching to take on the job, because she enjoyed talking to people who actually listen.) The original owner of the home had selected the property, which had belonged to his sister, for the alley of oak trees leading to the river. The house was oriented to the trees to take advantage of the breezes coming off the river. Mr. Roman had built the home in order to entice his wife, a city girl from New Orleans, to live out in the country, but she rarely stayed there because she had family members she needed to take care of back in New Orleans. It wasn’t until her husband’s death from tuberculosis that she moved to Oak Alley for good to run the plantation.</div>
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After the tour, we had a buffet lunch in one of the restaurants. Then we had more time available for walking around until our car pool driver needed to leave. D wanted to see the reconstructed slave quarters and exhibit, and I wanted to see the gift shop. We did a quick turn around the gift shop and went off the the cabins, which were quite close. </div>
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The first cabin had a list of first names of all the slaves that had worked on the plantation, plus one unknown. One of the slaves had figured out a way to grow pecans with shells thin enough to crack easily, an innovation initially credited to his owner. There were displays showing the clothing slaves wore, restraints used to capture runaway slaves, and other aspects of slave life you wouldn’t pick up watching <i>Gone With the Wind. </i></div>
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As we left and got ready to look for our ride, D turned to me and said, “Aren’t you glad we didn’t live back then?” Well, yeah, I have often said I am glad I didn’t live back in <a href="http://iamcoleslaw.blogspot.com/2011/09/back-in-day.html">the good old days</a>. But for me, the worst that could happen was that I would have grown up an illiterate Italian peasant, a life that could have had its good side. For D, the difference two hundred years would have made would be huge. She may, with her ancestory, have been a free woman of color, but more likely she would have been a slave, working back breaking labor, having the chance of her children being sold away from her, maybe being beaten. So yeah, I’m sure she was glad that she didn’t live -</div>
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“Because then we couldn’t even have been friends,” D went on.</div>
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It took a minute for this to sink in, and then I stopped in my tracks and reached to give her a hug. In the process I managed to bump into her and snag her sweater on my engagment ring. My spontaneous gestures have their downside.</div>
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“What,” she started, as I said, “Of all the awful things that could have happened if you had lived back then, the first one that comes to your mind is that we couldn’t have been friends? That means so much to me.”</div>
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We said a few other mushy things and then went to find B to get our ride back to church.</div>
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I know I have said before how privileged I am. I was born with an extra helping of smarts, I was born in the US because my ancestors were brave enough to come here, I was born at the right time to get practically a free ride to college and graduate school, and graduated at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, which benefitted women of my generation tremendously. As I have frequently told my husband, my life has been like an automatic door: it opens up in front of me and closes behind me and I hardly have to worry about it.</div>
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Now I see I have one more piece of privilege that I have never considered. I have a friend.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877872196122597956.post-77630995275241247962014-04-10T15:31:00.000-07:002014-04-10T17:11:04.610-07:00I've Been Here Before<div style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">
What with Monday, March 17th being St. Patrick’s Day, Saturday the 15th was the day of our city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. The weather looked a little iffy, with dark clouds covering the sky, but my weather app assured us we were safe from actual rain until 1 PM at least, so John and I took our parade chairs and our chances and went to the parade. We left early, to find parking, which meant we were on the street for over an hour before the floats and bands got to where we were.</div>
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And as I have written before, the large crowds of people with little to do draw the people who hand out tracts. The first such gentleman I had seen before at the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade. He was wearing camouflage cargo pants and a matching shirt, and carrying a bullhorn. Last time I saw him, he was preaching through the bullhorn, too, but whatever he was saying was drowned out by the traffic helicopter buzzing overhead. I’m sure that in keeping with the spirit of the day, it was “eat, drink, and be merry”. </div>
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As he passed by, I told my husband I’m surprised that he wasn’t carrying a gun to go with the camo outfit. John pointed out that the man had a backpack and who knows what he had in there. Best we didn’t argue with him. John and I politely turned down all offers of “something to read while you’re waiting” from him and the other proselytizers passing by. </div>
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One man that came by alone was a little harder to deflect. He had been chatting with the people next to us, seeming honestly interested in what they had to say. Then he finished up his conversation and turned to us. Predictably enough, he asked if we wanted one of the tracts he held in his hand, to have something to read while we waited for the parade. I told him that I had already read that one, having been given one the year before. He seemed a little taken aback, but asked what I thought of it.</div>
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“Here’s the thing,” I said. He wanted a conversation, I would give him a conversation. “The St. Patrick’s Day parade is mostly a Catholic celebration. The theology in those pamphlets is, as near as I can tell, Baptist. So to me, this is just a matter of tribal infighting, and I find it off-putting, to tell you the truth.” His face fell, but I could tell he wasn’t surprised by my response, and actually seemed to be giving it some thought. </div>
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“I’m not a Baptist, “ he replied. He belonged to a non-denominational church.</div>
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“Well, I’m a Methodist,” I said.</div>
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Somehow we got from there into a discussion of Lent. I told him that rather than give up something for Lent, I decided to act in the spirit of Isaiah 58:6,</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Is not this the fast that I choose:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">to loose the bonds of injustice,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">to undo the thongs of the yoke,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">to let the oppressed go free,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">and to break every yoke?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">an</span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">d donate money every Wednesday in Lent to organizations that do just that. My upcoming donation was to go to the Rolling Jubilee, and I explained to him what that was and how it related to the idea of the Jubilee year in the Bible.</span></div>
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It suddenly occurred to me I was doing a pretty passable job of sounding like a street preacher myself. This was not how I had intended to spend the day. I told him that I didn’t want to keep him any longer and said it had been nice talking to him. He went on down the street no doubt believing that I was bound for hell.</div>
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It turns out that donations for the Rolling Jubilee are now closed, so I gave the money to Amnesty International instead. I made seven donations in all:</div>
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1) Trafficking Hope, a local organization that helps victims of human trafficking</div>
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2) The rehab center where I used to work, which helps loose the bonds of children who are limited by physical and mental disabilities</div>
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3) Amnesty International</div>
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4) World Vision, when they announced they were broadening their spousal benefits to include same sex spouses. They then reverted to their original policy, but I figured the money I gave will still help someone.</div>
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5) A fund to help a woman who needs money to fight a defamation lawsuit from a man who sexually harrassed her</div>
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6) A fund to help a family who lost three children in a car wreck pay for funerals (that one strictly speaking didn’t fit the theme, but they were friends of a friend and needed the money).</div>
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7) Emily’s List (I’m sure that one would have gone over well with my tract bearing friend)</div>
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So that’s $700 in all. I wish I could say that I learned some valuable spiritual lesson from this, but I am actually feeling pretty grumpy by now. Giving up sodas or chocolate would have <i>saved</i> me money, I reflect. Still, I have to acknowledge how privileged I am. Giving up that money did not mean going without groceries, or heat, or medicine. I enjoy the power to be able to aid those who are doing work that I think needs doing. </div>
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Still, like my chocolate and soda pop deprived friends, I think Easter can’t come soon enough. The end of Lent is taking just a little longer than the end of my career as a street preacher.</div>
Coleslawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06813319585807128092noreply@blogger.com1